Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Organizers of the last session on the last day of the 2010 Annual Meeting, “New Emerging Business Models in Journal Publishing,” joked about the difficulty of rounding up a crowd to talk about journals in such a time slot. However, a good number of dedicated attendees put off their final happy hour and heard presentations on some of the innovative approaches their colleagues are taking in journals publishing. One of those innovations is coming out of Amsterdam University Press, where they are extending a commitment to open access to journals. Business Director Martin Voigt shared with the audience how working with partners has made this a feasible model.
An international member of AAUP, Amsterdam University Press (AUP), does not have a formal journals program: its journals are currently managed by the press’s editors. Five of their journals (one forthcoming) are open access, a continuation of the AUP’s commitment to exploring feasible models for open access monographs through the OAPEN program. The press decided to explore the possibility of open access journals for a variety of reasons. In addition to the desire to make scholarly work accessible, they feel it may be an answer to the serials crisis in journals, which has been slowing the development of new journals and has led to a shrinking audience. The obstacle in the way of this ideal was, of course, funding.
While many presses would like to make their content more accessible, all are aware of the costs required to develop and maintain a journal. AUP’s solution to this problem was to work with partners – libraries, faculties, institutes– to create a “financial basis” for any new journal. Working with scholarly partners ensures the quality of the content, as representatives from all of the partners constitute the journal’s advisory board. Collaboration makes sense for the partners, as they all have a vested interest in the field and the existence of a journal for publishing in that field. The partners also benefit by working together, rather than in competition, with similarly focused organizations. Involving a wide swath of a particular scholarly community also has the very practical benefit of decreasing the contribution for each partner. The cost of supporting the open access journal replaces the subscription fee (and is often less) that these institutions would pay in a traditional model.
As a case study of how this model plays out, Voigt presented on the Journal of Archaeology in the Low Countries (JALC). The journal came about when two archaeological institutions approached AUP and asked the press to calculate the costs of an open access journal covering archaeology in Holland and Belgium. After calculating costs, the press collaborated with the original two institutions to find an additional seven partners with interest in the field.
The press has developed a precise calculation of the required yearly costs for the operation of an open access journal. In the case of JALC, assuming a publishing frequency of one article per month, a part-time journal editor, IT development, and overhead, costs total €18,000. This cost is split evenly between the nine partners, leaving each responsible for €2,000 per year in addition to “their investment in time for acquisition, peer reviewing & editorial board.” This formula has been particularly successful for AUP because there is no risk involved – all costs have been anticipated and paid for by the funding partners. In fact, this model has also allowed the press to make a small profit, through subscription-based print-on-demand articles. Print subscriptions are available for € 99,95 a year, for which the subscriber receives two issues, each containing the previous six articles. Voigt reported that as of June, they had a steady 45 subscriptions, surely not a huge number, but an admirable bonus for an already self-sustaining project.
The benefits of publishing JALC online extend beyond the increased access it offers. While “enhanced publication” may sound like a suspect catchphrase to some, AUP, with the advice of its partners, has found ways to take advantage of the additional capabilities of digital in ways that are valuable to scholars. The online format allows the journal to publish the research data along with the articles themselves. Voigt shared an example of how they have been able to integrate technology particularly useful to archaeologists: he showed an image from an excavation of a burial, and subsequent slides displayed the added views provided by an online Geographical Information System (GIS), viewing the image as an X-ray and separating the objects.
When asked by an audience member whether the partners funding model has made publishing decisions political, Voigt said they had not run into problems of that nature. This is certainly a question that would need to be addressed by any press considering a similar model, taking into account the different types of potential partners with different sets of interests. University presses, however, are no strangers to the complexities of partnering with various institutions, something that they are engaging in more and more frequently. Amsterdam’s initiative of collaboration may prove to be a model for the successful merging of open access and sustainability.
View the presentation slides here: http://www.slideshare.net/aaupny/aup-new-emerging-business-models-in-journal-publishing-voigt
On July 27, AAUP and the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Center (SPARC) co-sponsored a webcast entitled “Innovation, the future of e-books, and the Archaeology of the Americas Digital Monograph Initiative.” Hosted by SPARC’s Jennifer McLennan, the webcast featured a presentation by Darrin Pratt, director of the University Press of Colorado, which explored the Mellon-funded initiative, how the AADMI had evolved from the original proposal, and what the participants were learning. The initiative partners have shifted their goal from technical innovation to business innovation, and see promise that their results will be scalable beyond the original presses, and perhaps beyond the original discipline as well.
With close to 100 participants from both the publishing and library communities, the presentation was followed by a question and answer session. Asked how the initiative would remain sustainable beyond the duration of the grant, Pratt answered that the most important factor would be partnerships in every phase. Thus far, the presses’ partnership has been a rewarding experience for all involved. Despite all of the presses publishing in the same field, Pratt has found that competition has not been a problem. Instead, collaborating on such a forward-looking project has been energizing.
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Computers and Composition Digital Press (CCDP) began in 2007 when digital writing scholars Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe saw shrinking opportunities for scholars in the field to publish their work, and limitations that were becoming an increasing hindrance to the scholarship that was published. What was needed was a press that would publish “pieces that couldn’t be represented in the two-dimensional spaces of print,” said Selfe, Humanities Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Ohio State University. Importantly however, these publications would also need the intellectual authority that came from peer review in order to hold value in the academic world. These frustrations sparked the idea for CCDP, and Hawisher and Selfe soon recruited other scholars in the field to help get the project off the ground. Selfe described the initial questions they had to address as the project began to take shape: “what kind of a press would publish these digital projects” and “what it meant [for the projects] to have the same specific gravity as a book.”
Finding a publishing partner that exemplified “the same values as tenure and promotion committees,” would be crucial – there would be no incentive for scholars to take advantage of new technologies to publish avant-garde texts if their work would not be accepted by the larger academic community. Coincidentally, Selfe’s home campus, Ohio State University, was in the process of revising its tenure and promotion guidelines, with one of the goals being “to strip out print biases.” Going through this process at her own institution, Selfe was able to outline the key criteria that would be necessary to make CCDP projects viable and competitive: peer review, university presses as preferential publishers, and a continuing value placed on intellectual reach, scope, and excellence. This is where Utah State University Press came in. Having published with Michael Spooner at USU Press and elsewhere beforehand, and familiar with the strong reputation of the press’s existing composition and rhetoric list, the editors felt that the press would be the perfect publishing partner. Spooner’s previous work, and the stature of Utah State University Press ensured them that this imprimatur would provide the project the “academic legitimacy” they were seeking for CCDP. Hawisher, Professor of English and University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, described the confidence they had that USU Press would give young scholars, whose work she feels is not always recognized by traditional outlets, the attention they deserved.
Spooner explained that the press decided to present CCDP as an imprint because “the idea of CCDP was created with an identity separate from USU.” Despite its all-digital output, “editorially, the project operates very much like a standard university press series.” Selfe and Hawisher handle the acquisitions and peer review process. Completed manuscripts are then sent to USU Press’s editorial board for a final vetting.
Generally, the imprint relies on its authors’ own technical expertise for the production aspects of these digital works. The press negotiates specifications for handling layout with the authors and editors. The ability of the imprint’s authors to provide projects ready for online publication is related to the demands of the field: “this isn’t a process that I’d attempt with just any series or imprint,” said Spooner, “It happens that scholars in this field have a higher than average expertise with document design, web design, programming, etc., and because of their academic appointments, some have regular access to new publishing and design software.”
Marketing efforts for the imprint have come from both the press and the editors. USU Press provides visibility on its web site, Facebook page, e-catalog, and email blasts, as well as a presence on exhibit tables and in occasional space ads. The editors and their colleagues do a great deal of old-fashioned word-of-mouth marketing, promoting the imprint at conferences, on email lists, and through other venues of scholarly exchange. In keeping with their born-digital roots, reviews by bloggers are featured in sidebars on the book web pages. Spooner added that the value of having such well-regarded editors cannot be underestimated: “the informal buzz created by the editors, their students, and colleagues is the most effective marketing presence.”
The editors were also pleased to find that Spooner and USU Press were amenable to their commitment to open access for the imprint. A commitment to open access is something that many presses and institutions feel is valuable, but financial pressures often make it difficult to implement in reality. CCDP has been able to maintain their policy of accessibility through the support of USU Press, USU Libraries, partner institutions, and the scholars who assist the imprint in various capacities. The editors, their colleagues, graduate students, and the imprint’s authors (as described above) all contribute their time and skills. For a digital imprint, technological resources have been essential; Selfe describes CCDP as “building on the technological infrastructure and margins of universities.” The site was originally hosted by Miami University of Ohio, then moved to the Illinois Institute of Technology, and will now be moving to Utah State.
The publication of a report from an MLA Task Force, as well as more recent letters from current MLA president Sidonie Smith, are factors the editors see giving the profession a push to move towards acknowledging this sort of work. Of course, the “availability of different kinds of technology” is another impetus, as the possibilities for digital work continue to expand. Said Hawisher: “When we had the support of a university press, we believed that we could publish these books and that colleagues could use these books in their tenure portfolio.” She sees the increasing move to e-publication as inevitable (and beneficial for the field), and believes that this project is one facet of learning how to “make this [shift to e-publishing] work for all of us.” The editors face the challenge of acquiring work that is, as Selfe described it, “conventional enough to be recognized as scholarly projects in terms of historical and genre expectations, and yet interesting enough to push those boundaries that require digital environments to be understood.” The real test comes in putting these ideals into practice: an upcoming CCDP project will be , Selfe believes, “the first native digital text for tenure at a Big Ten institution.”
In addition to the Press and its university partners, CCDP also has an association with the Institute of the Future of the Book (if:book), which Selfe described as providing a “philosophical template,” as well as some of the necessary software infrastructure. Having worked with members of the staff previously, the editors felt the partnership would also encourage authors to produce books in different environments, like Sophie, an if:book-developed platform they hope to utilize in future projects.
As for the future of the imprint, both editors envision projects including an increasing variety of media, as they truly become something that can be published only in an online venue, and “push the envelope for what is [considered] a book.” Just in the two books published so far, and two forthcoming projects, they have seen an increase in the amount and variety of digital media that has been incorporated – a trend they expect to continue as technological advances widen the realm of possibility. They had originally anticipated that it would take five years before producing works that were challenging boundaries, but feel that their second book, Generaciones’ Narratives, has already moved in that direction, with its inclusion of video interviews. An increasing variety of digital components is particularly important Spooner explained, “because this is the very stuff that needs to be legitimated before the [promotion and tenure] process.” There has been discussion of adding a print-on-demand component to the imprint. Such an idea remains theoretical at this point however, due to the obvious challenges of transposing the digital aspects of the projects. Another trend the editors see increasing with the proliferation of born-digital work is that of collaborative authorship, to an extent that can be rare in the humanities. The evolving demands of these projects necessitate drawing on the resources of multiple scholars: “authorship often has to happen in teams,” said Selfe, “different people contribute different skills.”
Spooner emphasized the importance of CCDP’s evolving online presence as they learn about the best ways to build their publications: “it’s important to us and to the scholars/authors/readers in this part of the field to have things accessible now, even knowing that formats will evolve in future.” The partners are continuing in this collaborative and innovative spirit as they work towards the mission encapsulated in CCDP’s tagline: “Open access. Peer-reviewed. Online.”
Cornell University Press, partnering with Cornell University Library and Cornell faculty in the departments of German Studies, Comparative Literature, History, Music, and Philosophy, have been awarded a new grant from the Mellon Foundation to support Signale: Modern German Letters, Cultures, and Thought. The new English-language book series will cover the literature, culture, criticism, and intellectual history of the German-speaking world. Works in the series will be published in electronic format and in short print runs backed up by trade-quality bound books produced on a print-on-demand basis.
Nearly 80% of AAUP members offer some form of free content on their web sites, and 35% offer full text of books. More than 90% work with the Google Books Partners program. Almost 44% are incorporating XML into some point of the production workflow. And approximately 83% of AAUP publishers find the lack of proven business models to be a serious concern in pursuing e-publishing, but 63% find the specter of online piracy to be at most a mild concern.
These are just a few items we learned from a survey of members in late 2009 on digital publishing. The survey had two goals: 1) to update and expand AAUP’s online directory of e-publishing projects; and 2) to gauge the extent to which various digital strategies are being adopted in members’ book publishing programs.
The report from the latter part of the survey has now been released and is available for download.
Earlier this summer, AAUP was very pleased to announce a new membership benefit under an agreement with iPublishCentral, a self-service e-content platform from Impelsys. Member presses have a long commitment to serving the needs of scholars across every field of study. As scholars move to online practices as heterogeneous as their disciplines, AAUP is pursuing new benefit programs that will ease the process of experimenting with and adopting the right e-publishing solutions for scholarly presses.
The iPublishCentral services range from book-marketing widgets to direct e-book sales to consumers. These flexible service menus offer a broad range of ways for content to be discovered by and delivered to readers. The new AAUP-Impelsys program provides discounted monthly iPublishCentral fees to our members. In addition to the negotiated discount scale, Impelsys is offering AAUP members a special inaugural deal: waived fees for the first 12 months of contracts signed by June 2010.
The MIT Press, a cutting-edge adopter of several electronic publishing solutions, chose iPublishCentral to power their direct-to-consumer e-books store. E-books at the MIT Press currently offers approximately 450 titles from all of the Press’s publication fields and categories (trade, monographs, illustrated, and text.) Gita Manaktala, MIT’s Editorial Director, reports that they have seen a broad range of interest across all of these fields and categories.
MIT uses iPublishPortal to sell both perpetual access and time-limited e-books—a “rental” model the Press has just recently rolled out. MIT launched the e-books store in March 2009 with an intended audience of individual consumers. The biggest surprise, Manaktala says, has been the interest from libraries in purchasing single-title e-books through the site. Increasing reliance on patron requests to drive e-book acquisitions could be a factor in this library market, where turning to the press directly may be faster and easier than sourcing the title through aggregators.
MIT Press continues to work on the site’s features, layouts, and e-book offerings, and has yet to undertake a major marketing push for their e-book store. Throughout the process of building and tinkering with the new site, Manaktala says Impelsys has been “really responsive and good to work with. Their team is sophisticated and helpful, and interested in making this a success.”
In July and August, Impelsys hosted four webinars to introduce their services and the new AAUP benefit program to member publishers. More than 20 AAUP members attended these online sessions and have been favorably impressed with what they have seen. The iPublishWidget capability allows for branded, dynamic marketing across web sites, social networks, and blogs. iPublishView-Inside, with fully-searchable text and publisher controls on browsing, is an additional tool for providing what numerous e-publishing experiments have shown in recent years: online content that breeds both interest and sales. Sameer Shariff, CEO of Impelsys. believes that this is a particularly important tool for scholarly publishers to reach readers across the globe: “Increasingly discriminating readers will access sample pages and make quick, convenient purchases from anywhere in the world, further strengthening the financial position of university presses.”
Web demos can be arranged for any AAUP member that is curious about these services. Impelsys will also be attending the Frankfurt Book fair, where interested presses can arrange a direct meeting. Use the online registration form or contact Ray Alba to set up a Frankfurt meeting or with other questions about Impelsys services. AAUP members can learn more about the AAUP-Impelsys program and pricing scale through the members web site [password required]. Impelsys also offers an online “Learning Center” for press staff to delve deeper into the functionality available.
To talk about AAUP’s current e-publishing programs with Impelsys and Tizra, or suggest new program ideas, members are invited to contact Brenna McLaughlin at bmclaughlin@aaupnet.org.
Released in July, the latest report from Ithaka is entitled “Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today.” The report came out of the Ithaka Case Studies in Sustainability project, which explores the “strategies being used to support digital initiatives over the long term.”
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Laments on the plight of the monograph abound of late, but Duke University Press is attempting to shake things up with its new program, the e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection. Modeled on the pricing structure of the e-Duke Journals Scholarly Collection, e-Duke Books offers online access to at least 100 new titles per year to subscribing libraries, in addition to access to many of the press’s backlist titles.
Michael McCullough, sales manager for the press, explained that director Steve Cohn “has been a driving force behind this for a number of years,” and had long been seeking to address “two separate but complementary problems,” that is, the decline in sales to academic libraries, and the challenge of finding the best way to make the press’s books available in digital form. As Cohn saw these two issues converging, he and his staff began to look into ways to address them, while “control[ling] our content as much as possible,” and without using multiple aggregators.
The e-Duke Books collection will include at least 100 new electronic books published by the press each year. The press typically publishes 115-120 new titles in a given year, and plans to include the great majority of these titles in the collection, excluding only “titles of regional or popular interest or titles to which Duke does not hold electronic rights.”
The press launched a pilot version of the program in 2008, with the participation of 19 US and Canadian libraries. Following a successful run with the pilot program, the press launched a full version in 2009. Collection prices are based on institutions’ 2005 Basic Carnegie Classifications, and range from $500 to $6,000 per year.
By ordering, libraries also receive access to the over 900 Duke University Press backlist books which are currently available in digital form. As the program continues, this backlist will grow in two ways. The 100+ new books that are included in the collection in a given year will become part of the backlist in subsequent years. Additionally, Duke expects to continue the work of digitizing older titles, further increasing the scope of their available backlist.
Offering such a large swath of its backlist as part of the collection required a substantial amount of digitization work. Some of the press’s titles had already been digitized through BiblioVault, funded by a grant which offered free or low-cost digitization services to university presses. That provided a head start for the press, although the remaining titles have required “fair amount of staff time” from the production department. The digitization efforts will also allow Duke to offer a single-title purchase model of e-books to libraries beginning this summer.
The press’s files are currently digitized as web-ready PDFs, with some of the conversion being handled by their partner, ebrary. The ebrary platform also allows full-text searching, and ensures that Duke’s content is cross-searchable with all ebrary content to which a library has access.
One particularly interesting aspect of Duke’s program is the option to purchase a $500 “print add-on option,” which will include cloth editions of all titles in the current year’s collection. Kimberly Steinle, Duke’s Library Relations Manager, indicated that this has been a very popular option among subscribers, with an uptake rate of more than 75%. She noted that the press wanted to ensure this was an optional add-on, rather than a requirement, as some smaller- to medium-sized libraries may not have the space for all of the books. Not requiring libraries to purchase the add-on also helps ensure that the electronic collection is as inexpensive as possible.
The option also fits well with the way the press envisions users accessing the titles. McCullough said he feels “students still don’t really want to read 40 pages at a time on screen,” and that he anticipates library patrons will more likely “discover the book online, and if they want to read more, we want to make that as easy as possible.” Having a cloth edition of the book available on the shelf facilitates this sort of fluidity.
Piracy issues have been a major concern for university presses of late, particularly with the advent of new e-publishing projects. While acknowledging that they are concerned with piracy in the same way as other university presses, McCullough explained that Duke feels the technology they are using successfully avoids any major risks. Ebrary’s printing and downloading restrictions were attributes that made the company a particularly attractive partner for Duke. With the ebrary technology, users are streaming the content, rather than downloading the material to their own computer. Additionally, ebrary limits the number of pages a user is able to print.
The e-Duke Books FAQ section has a comprehensive delineation of the various user policies of the site license, including interlibrary loan, course packs, electronic reserves, printing, and downloading. Steinle explained that these guidelines were developed in conjunction with ebrary, first looking at ebrary’s guidelines and then tailoring them to best meet the needs of the press’s content. Regarding the printing restrictions for example, she said, “our goal was to try to come as close as possible to how many pages would be in a [typical] chapter.”
Another risk for the press is how this sort of accessibility might affect course adoptions, such a mainstay of many university presses. McCullough said that this is an area in which time will tell how the subscription model affects these sales, but he again pointed to what he had spoken about earlier, that assumption most students still do not want to read book-length material online. Additionally, he pointed out that traditional library sales have not been in competition with paperback course adoptions.
As is the case with so many successful e-publishing initiatives, the press enlisted the help of the university library to provide subscribers to the program with enhanced MARC (MAchine-Readable Cataloging) records. McCullough explained that the press wanted to offer the highest level of metadata available, and thus enlisted the help of the catalogers from the Duke University Perkins/Bostock Library. With the MARC records, the cataloging happens on a chapter level – which results in a “real advantage” for both librarians and patrons. Attesting to the invaluable assistance of the library in this aspect of the project, he said, “we certainly could not be creating them [the MARC records] on our own.” Feedback from librarians was also valuable in making procedural changes to the pilot program, to best tailor the program and its offerings to the needs of libraries.
While hesitant to make any sweeping assessments at this early point in the program’s development, McCullough said the press is “very happy with the way it has gone so far.” He noted that the ability to work with colleagues who have managed the similar e-Duke Journals program has been a great help: “They’ve been through this process before.”
There are of course differences between the two programs, and unique challenges that the e-Duke Books staff is still tackling. While the majority of librarians and patrons are now accustomed to accessing journals electronically, McCullough feels that there is still some need to “sell them on the idea” of accessing books in the same manner. He also noted that librarians may be less likely to take a chance on unfamiliar models in “this challenging economic climate.”
McCullough thinks it is possible that other presses may adopt similar models in the near future, and anticipates that they will each vary them to reflect their press’s particular capacities and strengths. He pointed out that this type of model was particularly well suited to Duke’s publishing program. As their list is reasonably small, they were able to include all of their new titles, while maintaining a workable size for the press and a “cost that would not be prohibitive to libraries.” While some presses may choose to implement similar collections composed of titles in a particular subject area, the interdisciplinary nature of many of Duke’s books made this all-encompassing program a preferable option, as there was no need to fit books into neat categorizations. Duke’s well-known editorial profile as a publisher of interdisciplinary and innovative scholarship seems to have lent itself particularly well to this new model.
New Resource Center for Campus-Based Publishing Partnerships
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Libraries and university presses have always been inextricably bound up in each other’s success. While at its best this relationship can provide extensive benefits to the whole of scholarly communication, too often a lack of common understanding has led to conflicting interests. With the advent of digital publishing and the demand for new methods of scholarly communication, the need for the two institutions to share their strengths and resources is increasingly evident.
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition’s (SPARC) new Campus-Based Publishing Partnerships Resource Center is designed to help institutions meet that need. SPARC Senior Consultant Raym Crow explained that the idea for the guide and resource center came from “a meeting on library-press collaborations in June 2007, sponsored by the libraries and presses of the University of California and the University of Michigan.” Crow said that participants at the meeting, all actively involved in collaborative publishing initiatives, were “describ[ing] a common set of issues that they needed to address,” and it became clear that there was “a great deal of duplicative effort being expended as new partnerships wrestled with the same issues.”
It was this convergence of concerns that led Crow to create the “Guide to Critical Issues.” The guide is a five-part, comprehensive overview of what form these partnerships might take and practical considerations of how they might work.
Out of the guide grew the web resource center, which expands on issues covered therein, and keeps the information in the guide dynamic and relevant. Among the resources available are case studies, a bibliography, and LIBPRESS, an email list devoted to discussion of publishing partnerships. The resource is unique in that it gathered perspectives from librarians, press staff, and some who are straddling the divide (such as Monica McCormick, Program Officer for Digital Scholarly Publishing at New York University).
The guide and case studies are focused specifically on library-press collaborations, but the guide’s introduction indicates that “most of the discussion applies as well to other academic units that may participate in campus-based publishing partnerships.”
The accompanying resources have been compiled by the editorial board, which was formed after the completion of the guide to direct and support the web resource. Crow emphasized the collaborative and interactive nature of the resource center, explaining that it is “designed to grow based on user feedback and participation.” Presses are encouraged both to submit sample planning documents and resources, and to submit suggestions on topics that they feel should be added or expanded to make the resources practically useful. The direction and experience of the editorial board has been particularly valuable in developing these resources, says Crow: “These are people who know what’s relevant, what’s current, and what’s needed by participants on both the press and library sides of a partnership.”
Laura Cerruti, Director of Digital Content Development at the University of California Press, and Catherine Mitchell, Director of the California Digital Library’s e-Scholarship Publishing Program at the University of California, are both editorial board members who bring to the table their experience of collaboration on University of California Publishing Services (UCPubS). Mitchell described how the two organizations had been “unofficially collaborating in an episodic or opportunistic way,” and eventually came to the realization that they lacked “any kind of ongoing formal relationship that took into account the formal structure of the collaboration.” It was at this point that they decided to work with Crow, as they “decided one-off projects were not going to be sustainable in the long-run,” and establish a more formal collaboration that takes into account “sustainability and scalability.”
UCPubS combines the open access expertise of the library with the production, print-on-demand, marketing, and distribution strengths of the press to serve the wider University of California community. Cerruti commented that it was a “reality check” for both the press and the library when Crow helped them put numbers to things and be realistic about the financial picture for their projects. The hope is that more partnerships will benefit from this sort of practical approach, and undertake the “explicit planning” Crow advocates.
Cerruti said she sees the partnerships as particularly important for presses in that they allow them to “take steps forward towards some of the new business models that are out there – especially open access.” She believes presses know that open access is becoming increasingly important, but may not always be sure how to implement it. Both Cerruti and Mitchell agree that partnering with libraries, many of which are already working on open access, can facilitate a press’s move toward open access models.
On the flip side, as libraries are increasingly called upon by their universities to take on publishing roles, it is important for them to take advantage of the valuable experience and expertise of presses. Mitchell explained that these partnerships also benefit content providers who “feel strongly about open access, but also want to provide print publication,” emphasizing the importance of providing all of these options in a way that is not detrimental to a press’s business model.
Both Cerruti and Mitchell highlighted the fact that partnerships strengthen the case for university support of a press, as they demonstrate the institutional service provided. Cerruti pointed out that the practical nature of the guide makes it very easy for presses to make a case to their university about the relevance of university presses.
In terms of early feedback from presses and libraries, Crow noted that a survey of LIBPRESS participants indicated that the practical examples have been the most valuable. The editorial board now “intend[s] to increase the number of case studies, sample plans, and financial templates, as well as the networking support available through the site.”
Once the resource center is completely populated, Mitchell envisions it “enabling people to get a picture of the different models of what this kind of collaboration can be,” and that this will assist in getting partners to a point where “libraries and presses speak the same language, or at least a compatible language.” Crow hopes that the resources may encourage presses to “take the lead in creating publishing partnerships.”
Cerruti described the resource center as “one-stop shopping for resources and papers published every week,” facilitating easier access to curated content for users who may not have the time to devote on their own. Her hope is that the guide and resources will “reduce some of the duplicative experiments going on so that we can learn from each other.”
A more in-depth look at the guide and resource center is well worth it to anyone interested in campus-based publishing partnerships and their associated issues.
Those interested in joining LIBPRESS, the online discussion forum on issues of “collaborative digital publishing projects and models,” may do so here: http://listserv.ucop.edu/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A0=LIBPRESS-L.
Hear more about press collaborations at the AAUP Annual Meeting!
Friday, June 19: 1:45-3:00 pm
Plenary 2: Interpress Collaborations and Cross-Marketing Partnerships: Future Visions of Scholarly Communication (Panelists include Raym Crow and Laura Cerruti)
Saturday, June 20: 3:30-4:45
Library-Press Cooperation
(Moderator: Patrick Alexander, member of SPARC editorial board)
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Thomas Jefferson designed the iconic Rotunda building as the academic center of his newly founded University of Virginia, “demonstrating [his] belief that a university should have as its focus a collection of academic achievements1.” Appropriately, the electronic imprint of the University of Virginia Press takes its name from the campus landmark and fills that same role for the university in today’s digital age. Rotunda has been a stable flagship in the ever-changing realm of electronic publishing since its inception in 2001.
The original grant proposal to the Mellon Foundation for the Electronic Imprint, conceived by Nancy Essig, the former director of the press, and John Unsworth, the founder of the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, called for publication of born-digital scholarship. Mark Saunders, Manager of the Electronic Imprint, explained that suitable born-digital projects were scarce at the time. In response, the press’s new director, Penny Kaiserlian, along with a team of senior managers, decided to add digital editions of existing print publications to the imprint’s list, focusing on the press’s strength in critical and documentary editions.
By the start of 2009, Rotunda had published six projects in the 19th-Century Literature and Culture collection and four in the American Founding Era collection, with three more in active development. Two of the 19th-century projects, comparative textual editions of Herman Melville’s Typee and Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences, were in fact born-digital, and benefited from Rotunda’s extensive experience and expanding capabilities. The imprint is also “exploring a new collection in architecture with our colleagues at the Society for Architectural Historians.”
Kaiserlian has described the American Founding Era project as Rotunda’s “most ambitious collection yet.2” This collection brings together documentary editions of the primary and secondary materials that constitute The Papers of George Washington, The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, and The Adams Papers, all in digital format. Forthcoming digital editions include The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, The Papers of James Madison, and the Papers of Alexander Hamilton. Beyond this invaluable content, however, the project is notable for the broad scope of its collaborations with other university presses and historical societies and the extent of its interoperable capabilities.
Early on, the staff at the Imprint made a pivotal decision to develop a more costly platform based on emerging standards for XML rather than focus on PDF delivery as most publishers were doing. This has proved a major boon to Rotunda’s electronic publishing projects, as it has allowed maximum “functionality, flexibility, and scalability.” The staff took advantage of the “significant expertise in textual markup [that] already existed in various digital centers at the University of Virginia.” The staff felt that the nature of the content in the document editions necessitated “that we code at as deep a level as possible.” To achieve this end, the editorial and technical staff chose to go with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard, which has been developed by an international collective. David Sewell, leader of Rotunda’s staff on XML coding, now sits on the TEI Board of Directors.
Collaboration is an integral aspect of the American Founding Era project. In November 2008, Rotunda announced the release of a newly consolidated Founding Era platform, which makes the various documentary editions fully interoperable. Such a project would have been impossible without the cooperation and collaboration of the various project editors and sponsoring institutions and presses, as the various collections of papers are housed and edited at a variety of institutions. The Rotunda staff was responsible for the platform and the XML coding behind it, and drew up standards for conversion of the print volumes in conjunction with the documentary editors. Saunders described the varieties of expertise provided by some of the other participants:
In the case of the Adams Papers, conversion of the print volumes was managed by the staff of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The editors of the Washington Papers worked for many hours to disambiguate index entries to create a cumulative index for their 52-volume project, among other contributions of time and knowledge. The editors of the Jefferson Papers performed display proofreading on the converted files, and the staff of Princeton University Press contributed publishing expertise in rights, permissions, and marketing.
This many-layered collaboration resulted in a platform that allows users to navigate across editions in various ways. Saunders explained that the platform retains the ability for users to “see the documents as they are arranged in the print volumes” while enhancing the experience by also facilitating the ability of users to “search, navigate chronologically, and access the intellectual investment reflected in the indexes.”
The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, Rotunda’s first publication, is the only born-digital edition in the American Founding Era collection. Forthcoming volumes in the collection will be available in print first, to be followed in twelve to twenty-four months by inclusion in the digital edition. The Electronic Imprint’s institution of an XML workflow is enhancing the viability and ease of these dual editions. Commenting on the recent subventions awarded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC ), Saunders explained that while these were traditional publication subventions for the print volumes, the XML workflow allows forthcoming editions to “be published in print and digital formats using the same underlying edited files, so in effect the continuing investment of the NHPRC in these editions will now pay off in new ways.”
Rotunda’s Founding Era project has been cited by AAUP as an important example of publisher-added value in debates on various models of open access (see AAUP’s Letter of Support for the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act). Saunders said that Virginia has been closely following the debates over various forms of open access “for most of Rotunda’s existence.” In February 2008, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on an issue of open access directly impacting Rotunda and its publications: “The Founding Fathers’ Papers: Ensuring Public Access to our National Treasures.”
In April 2008, Allen Weinstein, then Archivist of the United States, released a report to Congress at the request of the Committees on Appropriations entitled “The Founders Online: Open Access to the Papers of America’s Founding Era.” Appropriately, Thomas Jefferson’s ink and pencil drawing of the South Elevation of the Rotunda is featured on the cover of the report. Weinstein details the ongoing efforts to produce documentary editions of these historical papers that have been in progress for years, or even decades, at various universities, university presses, and historical societies. He outlines two possible responses to the government’s call for online access to the papers: in the first, the government would scan the completed volumes as they become available, but “the volumes would not be electronically marked or indexed, making them difficult to search, and such an effort by a Federal agency would provide an inferior duplication of online publication efforts already taking place outside of Government.” The second option, recognizing the valuable work done by organizations currently involved in the process, Rotunda primary among them, suggests that the government provide support for these efforts including “engag[ing] a sole service provider to undertake transcription and document encoding for all Founding Fathers papers that have not yet been edited.” The staff at Rotunda has appreciated the report’s respect for the work of the project editors and the attention to finding an access model that is sustainable for the university press publishers of the print editions. They expect to resume these discussions with the arrival of a new Archivist and a new Congress.
University presses today are testing a variety of funding models as they attempt to find a balance between providing access to research and information and the necessity of covering operating costs. Saunders says of Rotunda’s business model, “Our interface has always promoted free discovery of our content, but our perpetual access business model has remained largely constant during the debates surrounding the Archivist’s report. At the document level, we remain a fee-based site.” This perpetual access model makes access to Rotunda’s publications available for varying fees, determined by a university’s Carnegie classification, with rates also available for other research institutions, high schools, and unaffiliated individuals. All users are able to browse the contents and conduct searches of the full text, although log-in is required to obtain access to the full contents.
Rotunda’s primary funding has until this point come from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the President’s Office of the University of Virginia, but Saunders explained that its ultimate mandate is to be self-sustaining. As described earlier, Rotunda’s projects are often indirectly supported by entities like the NHPRC, which has provided subventions for the documentary print editions. After the current grants expire, Rotunda’s sustaining revenue is expected to come from sale of its products and from grants for development of future individual projects. In an entrepreneurial move, Rotunda has also started Oculus, “which offers consulting services to other publishers and to digital projects that are in development,” also with the support of the Mellon Foundation.
Rotunda is well poised to continue in its role of presenting the academic achievements that are at the center of a university, both to the academic community, and with the American Founding Era project, to the nation at large.
1 “The Rotunda: History,” The University of Virginia, http://www.virginia.edu/uvatours/rotunda/rotundaHistory.html.
2Penny Kaiserlian, “University of Virginia Press,” in “University Presses 2008: Snapshots in Time,” compiled by Rebecca Ann Bartlett, Journal of Scholarly Publishing 40 (Oct. 2008): 26-28.
By Shaun Manning, Communications Coordinator, AAUP
While the opportunities and challenges of digital publishing remain hot button topics in the scholarly publishing community, the Romance Studies series from Penn State University Press represents a concrete example of how online and print-on-demand publishing can sustain projects that would otherwise not be possible. Originally titled Penn State Studies in Romance Literatures when it debuted in the early 1990s and discontinued early in the new century, the more broadly-based Romance Studies series allowed Penn State to continue publishing “first book” monographs in this field by taking advantage of new digital technologies.
“Penn State Romance Studies in large measure responded to the need to support an area of scholarship that was underserved, expanded its editorial focus to move beyond simply ‘literature’ to include film, theatre, translations, and other foreign language-related titles,” said Patrick H. Alexander, Co-Director of Penn State’s Office Digital Scholarly Publishing (ODSP), which oversees Romance Studies, and Associate Director/Editor-in-Chief of Penn State University Press. In addition to the four books currently available on the Romance Studies site, Penn State plans to release future titles at a rate of about three per year.
“This development coincided with the university’s press and libraries creating the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing (ODSP), under the leadership of Editor-in-Chief Peter Potter (now editor-in-chief at Cornell University Press) and Bonnie MacEwan (now dean of libraries at Auburn University),” Alexander explained. “Now co-directed by Michael J. Furlough, assistant dean of the libraries at Penn State, and myself, ODSP brings to bear the strengths of both library and press to experiment with making the volumes available–––at least initially–––both digitally and in a traditional, but ‘on-demand,’ print format.” He added that the press handles traditional publishing concerns, including peer review, copy editing, and design, while the library creates and hosts the online version using DPubS software, a platform originally developed for Cornell’s Project Euclid.
Given that the Romance Studies titles are available for sale in a print format as well as having significant portions available for free online, there was, at Penn State as with other presses exploring digital models, some concern as to whether the availability of these free chapters would ultimately hurt sales of the print volume. “Indeed there were concerns, and the jury’s still out,” Alexander said. “We wrestled with the conflict of interest between an Open Access online version and a printed edition. If the volume were available online, who would buy the print?” He added that the press’s partnership with the library alleviated many costs associated with digital publishing and distribution, but that print sales were still very important to offset the editorial, production, and other overhead costs of publishing.
“We weighed various options: no access, partial access, degraded print access, and full access,” Alexander said. ODSP’s solution was to offer all of books’ content available as chapter-by-chapter downloadable PDFs, but only around 50% of each book will be printable from these files. “It’s possible that some potential readers of Romance Studies titles will be happier to get a single chapter or do a short check online, rather than buy a book. But the online reading experience will not replicate the in-print experience, nor will printing out a whole book on the laser printer really replace the book.” He noted that the open access model presents an opportunity for greater dissemination of scholarship, but that questions remain as to how a majority of users will interact with the material in digital and print formats. For example, are the PDFs read on screen or printed out? What would each case indicate as to how Penn State should offer the Romance Studies books? Are users likely to print out an entire book, if all chapters were available, rather than simply purchasing a bound copy? “The problem is that we won’t be able to definitely prove these assumptions unless we can discover what motivates our readers’ behavior,” Alexander said.
Regardless of the challenges, though, the Romance Studies list from Penn State Press and the university’s Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing represents an important step for the press as it navigates the changing landscape of scholarly communication. “We recognize that standing still is not an option when the flow of knowledge and information and the demand of users for digital content are so great,” Alexander said. “ODSP has become a sort of Petrie dish that permits us to experiment in ways that as simply a ‘press’ we would not be able to do. In a noncompetitive environment, it allows the press to learn more about its own strengths and weaknesses and how to bring those to bear in fulfilling the university’s overall mission to disseminate knowledge and information.
“The Penn State Romance Studies series also represents a commitment to experimenting with ‘open access’ to book content that was emphasized as an imperative in AAUP’s Statement on Open Access drafted by our director, Sanford Thatcher, so as to help bridge the growing ‘digital divide’ between book and journal content in the OA world.”
By Shaun Manning
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Gutenberg-e, the digital publishing project started in 1999 by the American Historical Association (AHA) and Columbia University Press, recently made the transition from a paid subscription model to free open access. The shift comes as the final set of scholarly manuscripts nears publication, bringing the total count of born-digital monographs to thirty-six.
Supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Gutenberg-e was conceived by Kate Wittenberg, Program Director of the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC), and Robert Darnton, who was at the time President of AHA and a history professor at Princeton University, now serving as Director of the Harvard Libraries. Under the program, authors were awarded prizes by the AHA to develop their dissertations for publication. This provided emerging scholars—who might otherwise have been wary of the untested e-book medium—with the prestige of a major award and an assurance of legitimacy conferred by an AHA endorsement.
“The experiment was to test a number of things, primarily, what opportunities born-digital narrative might offer scholars, as well as whether a peer-reviewed digital monograph that was published by a major university press would have the same weight in terms of academic promotion as a print peer-reviewed monograph,” Wittenberg said.
The decision to take Gutenberg-e from a subscription-based to an open-access model comes as the final round of Mellon-funded monographs nears completion. At the close of the project, Gutenberg-e will have published 36 digital editions, of which 24 are now available online.
Serving as an early model of digital scholarly publishing, Gutenberg-e has given authors the opportunity to test the new possibilities provided by the medium. “The authors feel much more in charge of the design direction,” said Nathaniel Herz, Production Manager of Electronic Publications at Columbia University Digital Knowledge Ventures (DKV). “Given that the technical possibility and what can be presented are really much greater than with a print book, they are encouraged to seek out multimedia materials to supplement the main text, and also to take a role in designing the book that they wouldn’t have the opportunity to do in a traditional publishing model.” Herz said that, while there was not a sense of authors directing production, there was more of a conversation as to what would best serve the monograph.
Given the rate of technology’s progress, since its inception Gutenberg-e has seen a marked change in the digital publishing landscape and also the authors’ facility with available media. “From a production standpoint, we are always trying to take advantage of new technologies and adapt to changing best practices. The books themselves have changed over time, both in what we allow the authors to present and in the overall design of the look and feel,” Herz said. Wittenberg also observed that “over the six years of the project the more recent rounds of authors have been much more sophisticated in terms of their ability to use and their knowledge about technology.”
“The first couple of years, when the prizes were given out, we ran these workshops to help authors figure out how to create these digital works. They would come in and sort of ask: How do I take digital pictures? Can you tell me what kind of a camera to buy? By the last couple years, authors are really already very far along in their thinking about the use of digital technology in terms of links to archives and the ability to show works in their original languages, and the inclusion of audio and video,” she said.
Perhaps because of the democratization of internet development, where anyone can create his or her own web page cheaply and easily, there persists a popular myth that publishing online will represent a less expensive publishing model than traditional printed books. Wittenburg explained that this was not the case. “There are lots of advantages” to digital publishing, she said, “but everyone has found that it’s not cheaper or easier. Every experiment—commercial and non-commercial, scholarly and non-scholarly—has found that the possibilities are so much greater and more exciting. But, on the flipside, the costs—at least right now in these early experiments—do not disappear, they increase.
“What never goes away is the need for peer review, for intensive work with authors. In fact, the author relationship gets more and more exciting but more intense as the complexity of the digital work increases. And that’s one of the things that this project was actually designed to test. Now, going forward, there probably will be many more platforms and technologies, and authors’ expertise will grow to make this increasingly simple. The challenge is how you pay for and maintain these exciting projects.”
“One of the great values of this project,” Herz added, “is that this will be something that other digital, academic, scholarly publications can look at and learn from, and in five or ten years I’m sure there will be many more ideas about how you can do this in a more efficient way.
“It’s very exciting to be playing a part in a transition that is more or less inevitable to online publication. What exactly that will mean is still unclear, and this is an experiment along the way.”
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic & Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
Experiments with electronic publishing platforms and business models are proliferating ever faster these days. Some models are intended to serve the needs of specific fields, while others address the needs of a broad general audience. SUNY Press is now experimenting with a new electronic publishing model to serve a very specific time-and-purpose based market gap. SUNY’s new “Direct Text” makes e-book versions of new hardcover scholarly titles available to the course adoption market—bridging the gap between the hardcover and paperback editions.
Powered by the Publishers Row platform, Direct Text editions are available for $20, which allows purchasers 180 days of online access, plus the ability to download and print the PDF during that 6-month period. SUNY chose to make a free preview available through the platform, as well. The model—180 days for $20—is tailored to the needs of a semester-long class. A new hardcover scholarly monograph may cost anywhere from $40-100, which may prevent price-sensitive professors from assigning it to their (even more price-sensitive) students. Direct Text bridges that gap, making valuable scholarly content available for classroom adoption.
While the real test of SUNY’s experiment will come at the beginning of the Fall 2008 semester, the first sale was made within hours of the program’s soft launch, when the press made 20 titles available for purchase. SUNY expects to offer more than 100 titles by the end of the year.
SUNY has a history of adopting innovative digital models within their tradition of scholarly publication, being the first publisher to launch the co-branded Google Book Search on their web site, allowing full-text search of approximately 4,000 SUNY Press titles. Even now, the Direct Text program is just one of several new initiatives being undertaken by the press. Under the leadership of new director Gary Dunham, previously at the University of Nebraska Press, the press is finalizing the implementation of a customized press-wide database system and launching a new trade imprint, Excelsior Editions, which is set to debut with the Fall 2008 season. Across all their programs, continuing as well as experimental, SUNY Press is taking “Ever Upwards” to heart.
By Shaun Manning
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Supported by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, MIT Press has recently published six titles exploring the effects and interrelationships of emerging digital technologies on youth and learning. The books, available as free chapter-by-chapter downloads at MIT’s web site and also as cloth and paper editions, offer a substantial new body of scholarship in the field of digital media and learning, and will be followed by a new quarterly journal in winter 2009.
The books, collectively known as the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, view the effects of digital technology on youth identity, social interaction, and formal and informal education, among other topics. In titles such as Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected, edited by Tara McPherson, authors often treat technology as context rather than subject to more effectively examine how digital tools are being used by the youth who take such things for granted, and discover what opportunities may exist to enhance learning. In addition to the obvious benefits and perils bestowed by the internet, MIT’s Digital Media and Learning books also look at the roles of video games, social networking, amateur audio and video production, and mobile phones in establishing problem-solving skills, media literacy, and activism among the youth population. “This engages all of us as publishers,” said Ellen W. Faran, director of the MIT Press, “because today’s young people are tomorrow’s authors and readers. If their immersion in digital media makes them see and learn differently, we need to adapt.”
Though these are not the first scholarly books on digital culture and its effect on young people, the simultaneous publication of six titles represents a significant addition to the body of research available. Because of the significant interest in the field and the rapid pace at which the technological context evolves, MIT will follow up the Digital Media and Learning Series with the quarterly International Journal of Learning and Media (IJLM), which is also supported by the MacArthur Foundation and produced in partnership with the Monterey Institute for Technology in Education. “This new area is an emerging field of inquiry, highly interdisciplinary and also cross-sector in nature, involving practitioners and innovators as well as academics,” Faran said. “The faster exchanges and collaborative opportunities of the journal environment—including an online community—will support making these connections.” In keeping with its subject matter, the peer-reviewed IJLM will make use of web publishing’s multimedia capabilities to offer video content and an interactive community.
Each of the six titles— Civic Life Online; Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility; Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected; The Ecology of Games; Learning Race and Ethnicity; and Youth, Identity, and Digital Media—can be downloaded for free as single-chapter PDFs at mitpress.mit.edu. It is also possible to purchase print editions of these books, which MIT offers for $32 in hardcover or $16 paperback. As with any publishing project that offers free, open access to its content online side by side with that same content for sale in a physical book, the effects on customer purchase behavior can be difficult to quantify. But in a series focusing on the digital world—so much so, in fact, that free open access was a condition of the MacArthur digital learning grant—it is only appropriate that the value of publishing research online takes center stage. Further, adopting a perspective supported by the findings of the National Academies Press’s research on digital publishing, MIT views the two formats as complimentary rather than competing. “Readers and users seem to appreciate both for different purposes at different times,” Faran observed. “So far our sales of the paperback editions of the Series books are modest, which seems to bear this out.”
The MIT series represents a part of a larger initiative on the part of the MacArthur Foundation, a project studying the implications of digital culture and learning on the education system, policy decisions, and young people themselves. Information on grants and access to ongoing research are available at http://digitallearning.macfound.org/.
By Shaun Manning
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Now entering its second year, the Caravan Project (http://www.caravanbooks.org/) has refined its methods and goals to help scholarly publishers deliver books in non-standard formats. Developed by Peter Osnos as a way to navigate the emerging digital culture, Caravan has made 62 titles from eleven presses available as downloadable ebooks and audio books, and also created large-print editions through print-on-demand. Recently, Caravan was awarded a $25,000 grant by the National Association of College Stores (NACS), which will allow for increased exposure in university bookstores.
Osnos describes Caravan as a “system of research and development” aimed at increasing serious non-fiction publishers’ options for producing and distributing content. AAUP members participating in the Caravan Project include Beacon Press, University of California Press, University of North Carolina Press, Yale University Press, and more. “Caravan is an effort to enable publishers to do books in all the ways that technology now permits and to support distribution of those books through all the available channels.” The goals, Osnos said, are twofold: “We want to help publishers to know how to do electronic books, and distributors to know how to sell them.” He acknowledged that while many university presses operate their own digital initiatives, Caravan provides the option of offering multiple electronic formats, including PDF, Microsoft Reader, and audio files that can play on any portable music player. Though the POD aspect of Caravan may seem out of place—a physical product in an otherwise digital operation—the experiment is paying off. Recently, one vendor ordered three hundred copies of a large print book through Caravan’s print-on-demand service, an order that might not have been possible to fill through traditional publishing systems.
With Caravan established as a service for university presses and other scholarly publishers, it is perhaps not surprising that it was awarded a grant from the National Association of College Stores (NAS) to promote its products in the academic environment. The groundwork for the grant was set when Osnos gave a presentation on Caravan at an NACS convention, and the association saw the potential benefits of this publishing program for its members. The NACS grant will allow college stores to sell Caravan’s digital products, thereby giving the stores a model on which to base other sales of digital content in the future.
The distribution piece of the Caravan Project has already undergone notable changes since its inception, based on early results. Caravan has moved toward a more comprehensive system of digital distribution by taking advantage of recently-launched initiatives from Ingram’s Digital Ventures, booksense.com, and Overdrive’s Content Reserves, which offers e-books and audio books to libraries and can be adapted for use at retail stores. “The most effective way we can sell these books, once we’ve created them, is through the growing universe of digital delivery systems,” Osnos said. In addition to taking advantage of these larger-scale distribution systems for booksellers, a partnership with Emusic.com, one of the largest vendors of digital music, will soon make Caravan titles available for download at the site’s recently-launched audio books section.
As patterns of user preference emerged, there were also some changes in the available formats. Caravan had been offering its audio books on CDs in addition to the downloadable mp3s. But Osnos said that audio books on CD were less popular than digital files. “What we’ve found is, for people who do want the CD, we can distribute an audio book as a download and allow the listener to create one CD, and that way you don’t have to ship a CD.” The digital rights management (DRM) code of the audio book digital files allows customers to produce a single disc for personal use.
According to Osnos, the possibilities created by Caravan represent a substantial shift in publishing, as new technologies will allow publishers to operate on a more “made to order” system. If books are printed on demand, or serially available in digital formats, the problem of excess inventory will be greatly reduced. The flexibility of digital media also allows Caravan to make participating publishers’ books available by chapter or section, an option that will prove useful to students and researchers. Though some of this may have been possible in the recent past, only in the last few years has research been available that has indicated the most effective methods of producing and distributing digital content. In addition, consumer interest in e-books is currently in an upward swing with the advent of Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s E-Reader devices, and the popularity of audio books has soared with the ubiquitous use of mp3 players such as the Apple’s ipod. “In time digital books will become increasingly significant sources of revenue, as the public become more familiar with digital formats,” Osnos said.
Because Caravan is not itself a publisher or vendor, it does not set or suggest prices for the digital and POD books created through the initiative. But Osnos hopes that as publishers gain greater familiarity with these formats this will lead to audio and e-books bearing prices that are competitive with the standard editions. Currently, he noted, audio books can be fifty percent more expensive than a new release hardcover.
The Caravan Project is set to conclude in mid-2009, at which time the findings of the program’s research will be published in a final report, possibly as a multi-platform book. But the life of Caravan will continue in the implementation of its research into digital publishing and distribution systems. “By all means, we hope and expect publishers to use what we’ve all learned in their own multi-platform programs,” Osnos said.
By Shaun Manning
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Though debate over digital publishing and open access is still far from resolved, university presses are beginning to take bold steps in the hope of innovation. Perhaps out of necessity, and certainly driven by mission statements promoting the dissemination of scholarly research, academic publishers have taken the lead in exploring the implications of open access and the real and perceived differences between web-based and print publications.
Recently, the University of Pittsburgh Press has announced that it is working to make selected backlist titles available online, free of charge, through Pitt’s University Library System (ULS). The first of the Pitt Press collections to be made available online is the Latin American Series, with thirty-nine titles already presented for open access. Readers of the digital editions can click on any chapter or article from the table of contents, and then browse through the entire book. It is also possible to download individual pages as PDF documents, perform a full-text search of the book, and skip to any page using a drop-down menu.
A product of shared objectives between University of Pittsburgh’s press and libraries, this collaboration follows a trend of increasing cooperation between such custodians of research. “This pilot project emerged from a series of discussions which addressed areas of common concern regarding emerging technologies, the dissemination of scholarship, trends in both the sales and usage patterns of various forms of media, and the appropriate roles of both the library and the Press in the scholarly communication system,” said Peter Kracht, Editorial Director and Director of Electronic Publishing at University of Pittsburgh Press.
The partnership benefits the libraries by offering additional content for their electronic catalog, while providing the press with an opportunity to enter the digital arena with a more robust presence than it could otherwise achieve. ULS will be responsible for all costs associated with the program, and will also employ its technology assets and infrastructure toward digitizing the press’s backlist. “As a smaller university press, frankly Pittsburgh lacked the independent capacity to launch a major digital publishing initiative on our own. The Pitt library, which has long held substantial collections of public-domain materials in a number of subject areas, had already invested in the equipment and staff to provide a scanning as well as digital storage and search capabilities to access this material,” Kracht said. “It was not hard for both sides to see the advantages of cooperating on a initiative such as this.”
D-Scribe, ULS’s digital archive, already has a formidable database of open-access digital content. Drawing on resources from the University of Pittsburgh Library system, the university’s digital thesis program, and other cultural institutions, D-Scribe’s archive includes more than sixty collections of photography, archival documents, theses and dissertations, and electronic journals. But with the addition of the press’s Digital Editions, the University Library System may eventually acquire up to five hundred titles.
As with other digital publishing ventures that make commercially available material accessible for free online, University of Pittsburgh Press will be tracking the effects of the D-Scribe project on sales of printed books during this experimental phase. But this will only be one factor in determining how the initiative progresses. According to Kracht, the launch of UPP’s Digital Editions has been coordinated so as to highlight factors beyond sales and revenue, by selecting titles and a list that would be less vulnerable to cannibalization and to which the press has undisputed claims to the electronic rights. “
Inherent in this process is an exploration of the changing role of university presses and evaluating the options available to presses in a digital environment. “It may be that the lessons we learn suggest the need for some rethinking about the best ways to underwrite the dissemination of scholarship than the traditional consumer-pays-for-print-edition system,” Kracht said. He suggested that what may eventually emerge is a system by which print and digital media complement each other across markets, and this assertion has been supported by research into electronic publishing carried out by other member presses. Certainly, the benefits of having digital editions exist side by side with print publications would include increased access to scholarly research and the option of a format of presentation that is convenient for different users.
Like other university presses that have entered into digital publishing endeavors, the University of Pittsburgh Press has needed to make a series of decision as to format and access. Its publishing model is similar to University of Michigan’s digitalculturebooks site, in which the university’s press and library joined to create online versions of new media publications. (See “dcbooks Tests the Digital Waters,” The Exchange, Winter/Spring 2007). But unlike another project, put forth by the National Academies Press, Pittsburgh does not allow users to download the entire book or individual chapters as PDF documents. NAP charges a fee for this format and offers full-text browsing on the site for free, while Pitt maintains only the free browsing model.
Though the landscape of digital publishing is always shifting and the research of various organizations is constantly adjusting publisher strategies, Kracht sees online content as a necessary component of Pitt’s mission-based publishing program. “The combination of digital format with open access allows us to provide a genuine service to the international scholarly community by making this material readily available in the region and beyond.”
The University of Pittsburgh Press Digital Editions can be found at: http://digital.library.pitt.edu/p/pittpress/
The ULS Digital Library homepage is http://www.library.pitt.edu/
By Barbara Kline Pope
Executive Director, National Academies Press
Originally published in the Exchange, Summer 2003. Look for an article about NAP’s follow-up study of their digital publishing model in the Winter 2008 Exchange.
The National Academies Press (NAP) has been a leader in the electronic book publishing industry since launching its web site (www.nap.edu) in 1994. With annual sales revenue from all distribution channels of more than $7 million, NAP is one of the larger mid-size publishers within the university press community. NAP is the publisher for the National Academies: National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council. The Press’s dual mission is to disseminate the works of the National Academies to the greatest possible extent while fully supporting the cost of its own operation without subsidy from its parent institution.
NAP posts the text of all of its titles on the web in page-by-page image format free for anyone to browse, search, and read. A couple of years ago, it became clear that many within the leadership of the National Academies felt that NAP should begin giving away PDF versions of their books in order to enhance the dissemination mission. The bulk of this group hypothesized that NAP would not suffer financially from this action. However, others worried about the fiscal viability of this new model, postulating that posting free PDFs might erode a significant amount of revenue from print sales. Neither side had any data to support its views.
It was at this juncture that NAP decided that measuring customer behavior toward electronic content was of utmost importance to the future. The Press also felt that a serious study of these issues might help other scholarly publishers more efficiently find their way through the maze of options for presenting books to their readers. So, NAP, in conjunction with the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business, set forth a successful proposal for a study of potential digital publishing business models to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The study focused on four research objectives: (1) to compare NAP’s offline and online customers on attitudes and behavior toward electronic content, (2) to measure the effectiveness of free online browsing and its impact on the purchase of printed and electronic formats, (3) to determine the optimal design and pricing of NAP’s e-content (specifically the PDF format), and (4) to study the demand for unbundled e-content (delivering electronic chapters of books). The study used a mix of survey-based descriptive research and experiment-based causal research in order to answer the research questions.
A unique online experiment that allowed NAP to measure actual purchase behavior rather than only gather purchase intentions via surveys formed the core of the research undertaken. During two months of intensive data gathering, customers were given experimental treatments as they interacted with NAP’s web site. For example, if a customer came to the site and placed a printed book in their shopping cart, they were presented with a pop-up box that explained that the particular book in question was available in PDF format. They then had the choice of sticking with their printed book, exchanging it for a PDF, or taking both versions. The prices of PDFs were randomized across the entire 500 books in the experiment from 0%-110% of the printed price. In our example, let’s say that the price of the printed book was $40 and the PDF was randomly assigned a zero price. If the customer jettisoned their printed book for a PDF, it was logged as a $40 loss.
In another segment of the experiment, NAP measured potential market expansion. If a customer was only browsing through the free content and then decided to purchase a PDF, that was logged as additional revenue. After the customers completed the experimental section of their Web experience, they were asked to complete a survey designed to get at why they did or did not purchase a PDF, about their perceptions of quality the of the PDF vs. print, and demographics.
The study illuminated the continued strength of demand for printed books. Even when customers were offered a PDF for free, more than half opted to pay for the printed book instead. On the other hand, slightly less than half took the free PDF rather than purchasing a book—behavior that could mean great losses in print revenue.
Comparing customers who order online with those who purchase books offline, the study revealed, not surprisingly, that NAP’s online customers are much more enthusiastic about e-content than customers who typically order via offline methods. Offline customers generally have poorer perceptions of the quality of e-content and most likely will need more experience with high-quality online content to change their perceptions.
Among online customers, the study showed that there exist specific segments of customers, some with strong preferences for print and some with equally strong predilection for PDF format. Surprisingly, the research showed that there is a segment of customers who are willing to pay a premium for access to downloadable and printable digital content.
In general, however, the NAP results indicate that customers are less willing to pay for e-content than for print—and they believe that PDFs should be cheaper than print. The study also illustrates that, as customers interact with e-content more—in terms of browsing and downloading content, and sampling PDFs—they are more likely to improve their perceptions of PDF and might be more likely to buy e-content.
The findings also indicate that unbundling content (selling books by the chapter) can result in higher market expansion than offering only the entire book. But, a strategy of bundling the PDF with print can fill demand for customers who view PDF and print as complements rather than direct substitutes. Capitalizing on these groups with attractive pricing strategies can help to mitigate losses. NAP’s customers tend to be quite price-inelastic in regard to chapter prices as compared to full PDF prices in the ranges of prices studied. In the case of the full PDF, once the assigned price was higher than zero, the study showed that demand did not change dramatically with price variations. NAP’s study also demonstrated that Internet speed has an impact on the purchase of the PDF format, but only in the case of the full PDF.
Overall, results suggested that the time is ripe for NAP and perhaps other scholarly book publishers to begin selling PDF format e-content to take advantage of customers’ demand for digital books. The National Academies Press has already begun.
The results and the full report from this study are available online at: http://aaupnet.org/resources/mellon/nap/index.html
The Caravan Project, an ongoing test distribute books in a variety of
digital and non-standard formats, has received a $25,000 grant from the
NACS Foundation, the charitable branch of the National Association of
College Stores, to sell Caravan’s titles through NACS stores. The
Caravan Project’s homepage is http://www.caravanbooks.org/, and news of the grant was featured on Publishers Weekly.
The New Imprint of the University of Michigan Press
by Michael McCutcheon
As digital technologies transform traditional business, publishers of all walks are being swept up in the shift. It is against this backdrop that current debates over the future of scholarly publishing are set. In the words of Phil Pochoda, Director of the University of Michigan Press, “We are on the verge of a paradigm shift in publishing…. Although difficult to forecast concretely, it’s important that presses play a significant role in this transformation, otherwise we’ll be left out of building our own future.” This thinking is the impetus behind the University of Michigan’s latest online project—digitalculturebooks.
The new imprint, affectionately known as dcbooks, employs a partnership between the University’s press and library in pursuit of a more advanced online publishing model. Developing this relationship between the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO) at the University of Michigan Library has been a great advantage for the Press. The partnership allows for the pooling of resources and sharing of technical expertise that is vital to an online project. Maria Bonn, Director of the SPO, explained that, “[The SPO and the University of Michigan Press] have had a long history of friendly but generally non-productive overtures toward each other, looking for collaboration opportunities that really made sense…. This time the idea took.” Pochoda wrote the initial proposal and discussions played out over the course of the next year to determine the form and content of the imprint.
The division of labor is traditional yet collaborative. The Press plays the primary role in acquisitions, while the SPO office manages the online portal. However, as Pochoda says, the “idea is that neither [the Press or the SPO] are treated as a service agency. Both are fully informed and involved in all phases of the publication process. The relationship is fully transparent.” This ongoing consultation means, for example, that the Press discusses the online functionality of projects with the SPO, while the SPO consults on titles selected for publication. There is some tension between the two cultures, as Pochoda describes, “[The Press] has to be a revenue producer and the Library less so. They get much of their revenue upstream, and we get it downstream.” In light of this difference, one of the goals is to develop a “revised business model with which both sides can be comfortable.”
The imprint debuted online with The Best of Technology Writing: 2006, edited by Brendan I. Koerner. Comprised of twenty-four articles, the series lends itself well to the online model. On a single web page the articles are listed with hyperlinks that take the user to another HTML page where they can be read for free. In this fashion one could read the entire book without ever having to open a wallet. A link at the top of the screen allows the user to add it to their “bookbag” if they would like to purchase it in print. Currently, the book is not offered in PDF format, although the HTML allows printing and cut-and-paste. Operating under a Creative Commons non-commercial, non-derivative license, both the press and the authors agree that there must be a free version of each title available to readers.
In some ways the dcbooks model is similar
to other endeavors in online publishing, such as those at the National Academies Press. The NAP offers many of their books for purchase in hardcopy, as a PDF (including single chapters), or to be read online for free. In a study published by the NAP in 2003, they note that, “A cursory analysis of the sales figures…suggests that online print orders have grown steadily since free browsing became available. However, it was not clear whether the increase could be attributed to free browsing or the increased presence of consumers on the web.” Good news for online publishing, with the caveat that more research is needed.
Part of the purpose of dcbooks will be to collect qualitative and quantitative data from users, to better understand “how reading habits and preferences vary across communities and genres.” The data will be helpful in better understanding the online reader—who they are and how they would like to see online models develop. It will also be beneficial in investigating the economics of Open Access publishing. All of this data will contribute to the discussion over the future of scholarly communication, and the question of how presses are to remain both financially viable and true to their purpose of disseminating quality scholarship far and wide.
As the entire project is relatively new, there are a lot of people waiting to see whether the model being tested is a viable one. Bonn described the feedback she’s received thus far as “limited but positive. Authors are intrigued, libraries and publishers are interested, and administrators are tracking to see if we develop a successful publishing model.” It seems it will be a success if the free, online component helps to generate buzz and interest in the print versions, which will drive up revenue. This would allow for the model to be both financially stable and lead to increased access. Pochoda says, “There is no question in my mind that sooner rather than later university press publishing will migrate to primarily online dissemination. We’re testing that proposition somewhat with dcbooks, but being very cautious at first.”
The imprint’s reception among authors may be divided depending on their area of scholarship. When asked how she would like to see the project develop, Alison Mackeen, Acquiring Editor at the University of Michigan Press, said, “I would be thrilled if it helps to expose otherwise reluctant scholars to the advantages of online publishing, and thereby improves the visibility and prestige of online publishing, among humanists in particular.” And here is perhaps where the division is most clearly seen. “It is nevertheless clear that humanities authors are more conflicted about the possibility of a parallel online edition than, say, academics in information schools or media and communication studies.”
Over the course of the next year the imprint will be publishing at least eight titles, and in the process testing the economics and viability of the model. The recently launched New Media World Series is edited Professor Joseph Turow of the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School for Communication. A Digital Media and Youth series will be launched in August, to be edited by Mimi Ito and Ellen Seiter of the USC Annenberg School for Communication.
As dcbooks continues to develop definite outcomes remain up in the air. Pochoda says, “When the dust settles, the press won’t be the press we knew and the libraries won’t be the libraries we knew. We’re curious to see where we turn out, and no one can predict that yet—meanwhile, we’re enjoying the ride.”
The Chicago Manual of Style Online
by Michael McCutcheon
Communications Assistant, AAUP
Many of our member presses have undertaken electronic publishing projects that are expanding access and generating buzz. Through a series of articles we hope to begin sharing the successes and challenges that come with breaking new ground.
Books and e-books may sound like rivals, but it doesn’t mean they always are. The text of The Chicago Manual of Style went digital in late 2006 and is one of the latest electronic resources on the web courtesy of university presses. Although still a work in progress, the project has been well received and proven complementary to its hardcover-cousin.
Although there was already an online Q&A that accompanied the 14th edition, according to Carol Kasper, Marketing Director for the Books Division at the University of Chicago Press, they decided to put the complete text online after receiving a lot of feedback from users who said that “they would welcome an electronic edition.” And, in this case at least, the press agreed that the customer’s always right.
Published in 2003, the 15th edition went live 3 years later as a subscription-based service. Now, the content of all 956 pages is online and fully searchable with the click of a button. Individual users can have access to the entire text for an annual fee of $25 with different pricing models for libraries and corporations/institutions. Yet accompanying the full text are a number of tools that can still be used for free. Subscribers and non-subscribers alike can peruse the online Q&A, which is both informative and clever, and the citation guide, which provides clear examples of Chicago-style citations. Users have responded with extremely positive feedback.
When the Manual Online was launched in September 2006 there was an initial surge of traffic that has since slowed, but Kasper notes that they are “steadily adding customers…and have tripled since the first big wave of subscribers.” What may be a little surprising is how this electronic resource has affected sales of the print version—it hasn’t. Sales of the book are “behaving the way they did before the electronic version appeared online.” What’s new is that a lot of people seem to be using both resources at once. Kasper said that the University of Chicago Press has done market research and of online subscribers “80% still use the book as well.”
The primary purpose of the Manual Online is not to sell books nor is it meant to drive traffic to the University of Chicago Press website. Although there is some overlap, Dean Blobaum, E-marketing Manager at the Press, states that the Manual Online “intends to be, is on the way to becoming, a self-sustaining online subscription product and destination.” And as with any online project, the work is never really done.
The Manual Online is still being developed as Chicago seeks input from users and focus groups in order to improve future versions. Currently, they have plans to add additional features such as bookmarking, electronic notes, and the ability to create custom style sheets that can be emailed to other users. These features will further personalize the online version and improve the user experience. For those that want an electronic project of their own, be prepared to work both backwards and forwards to develop it.
The difficulty, as Kasper notes, is that the development of an online project isn’t linear like that of a book where it moves from one department to the next. Instead, it is “three dimensional and a lot things have to be done simultaneously.” This requires the “business and development know-how” along with a “revised work flow and chain of responsibility” that can keep up with the continual process of updating the site, responding to users, and marketing the product year after year. Kasper acknowledged that the online Manual was a “long and complicated project” despite a good IT staff and experience with online journals. She recommended hiring a consultant for any first-timers, but the results are worthy of the effort.
Although there is a big learning curve when undertaking a project like this for the first time, afterwards the capacity is in place to do it again. When asked about any closing thoughts Kasper laughed and said, “It’s hard work. It really changes how you’re used to working.” When asked if Chicago had plans to do more projects like this down the road she responded quickly, “Yes, we certainly have plans to do others.”
Chicago Manual of Style Online: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/
Other AAUP member electronic publishing projects: http://aaupnet.org/resources/electronic.html